Why would be bother printing them if there were a low cost digital display device, a kind of digital photo frame. You'll have heard mention of a digital photo frame many times but they are real and this on from ATMT is brand new and about to hit the UK market for less than £70. This model is a 7" TFT LCD panel which is styled in silver to look like a modern photo frame, yes it's a bit chubbier due to all the electronics inside but it does still look good.

Operation is pretty straight forward with the ATMT photo frame accepting a range of memory cards (MS, SD, XD, MMC) from which images are displayed onto the screen. The screen has a resolution of 480 x 234 pixels which may not sound like much but is not at all bad for a 7 inch display, brightness of 250cd/m2 is half that of a standard TFT screen so images are not so PC looking but more like an amply illuminated photo. This model is the bigger brother from ATMT and it also handles video files formats of MPEG-1 / 2 and DivX so that you can show short movies with sound as the screen also has two tin y 2 watt speakers.

The unit is mains powered via the supplied adaptor and after sliding in you memory card it presents various options via the on screen display, then using the remote you can choose what you want to do. Perhaps the best starting point is to display images (JPEG only) as thumbnails in order to find the ones you want. These can then either be displayed singularly or as part of a rotating slideshow. The screen does a good job of showing the images and has a fairly wide angle of acceptance at 40 degrees from the centre although this isn't as good as a normal photo in a frame (obviously) but then you can't have your normal photo frame running a slide show can you?

The downside of this ATMT device is that it has no storage of its own so that you always have to leave your memory card plugged into the unit, hardly ideal if you've just taken it out of the camera and haven't got a card to plug in instead. We thought of buying a card just for the frame but then how to transfer from one card (in our camera) to the one in the frame, well that needs a PC. Rats there goes the claim of not needing a PC that ATMT make for this device.

Priced at £70 or less for this video capable model with the remote it's the first time we've seen a digital photo frame for under £100 but it strikes us that the lack of any onboard memory limits its use and frustrated us meaning we had to use a PC and should have budgeted for a memory card to go with the frame. There is a USB port on the model so we could have hooked it up to a PC and left a memory card inserted and pushed images from the PC, this is probably the best way to use the frame.

Sadly this inability to easily transfer new images or video onto the ATMT photo frame means we can't give it a full recommendation but for the price it will make a novel gift for the gadget fan or photographer who isn't too upset by the less than ideal image resolution.

Published - 22/10/2006

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